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leilamulveny

Trump's Performance Could Decide Senate as Well - WSJ.com - 0 views

  • The competitive GOP-held seats include Colorado and Arizona, where the electorate leans Democratic, and seven others such as North Carolina and Iowa that are rated as toss-ups by the Cook Political Report.
  • Republicans are mostly playing defense due to the seats in play this cycle, but are confident of flipping a Democratic seat in Alabama and are also competitive in Michigan.
  • Republicans currently have a 53-47 majority in the chamber.
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  • In most of the states where polls show Mr. Trump leading, they also show the GOP senate candidate leading
  • Likewise, where polls show former Vice President Joe Biden in front, they show the Democratic Senate candidate in front
aleija

What Turn Are We Really Rounding on the Virus? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • At a rally in Arizona yesterday, he said the country was “rounding the turn” on the virus, and promised that a vaccine would be available “momentarily.” (A widely available one is still months away, experts say.)
  • Even if I win, it’s going to take a lot of hard work to end this pandemic,” he said yesterday before heading to a state office building to vote alongside his wife, Jill Biden. “I’m not running on the false promise of being able to end this pandemic by flipping a switch.” He added, “We’ll let science drive our decisions.”
  • He also tweaked Trump over a rally he had held the night before in Omaha, where an organizing snafu stranded hundreds of attendees in the near-freezing cold for hours.
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  • he Omaha police said that roughly 30 people had sought medical attention during the episode, and half a dozen had been hospitalized.
  • Biden was essentially tied with Trump among white voters in the poll, driven by nearly two-to-one support from white people with college degrees.
  • Pennsylvania is poised to accept mail-in ballots that arrive up to three days after Election Day, and North Carolina can keep counting for nine days, after the Supreme Court yesterday issued two rulings widely seen as favorable to Democrats.
  • “Issuing my critiques without attribution forced the President to answer them directly on their merits or not at all, rather than creating distractions through petty insults and name-calling,” he wrote.
  • “But too often in times of crisis, I saw Donald Trump prove he is a man without character, and his personal defects have resulted in leadership failures so significant that they can be measured in lost American lives.”
dytonka

New audio tapes show how Trump bet against science - CNNPolitics - 0 views

shared by dytonka on 30 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • Dark warnings by scientists and new data showing a nationwide explosion in a virus Trump says is going away, crashing stock markets and real-time examples of the White House's delusions about its failed response are consuming the President as tens of millions of early voters cast judgment.
  • The economy grew at a record annualized rate of 33.1% between July and September and was up 7.4% quarter on quarter.
  • With more than 75 million votes already cast -- one-third of registered voters -- the chance for a late change to the race is limited, even as the President tried to shore up his far Western power base with rallies in Arizona, a state that could help Biden block his route to 270 electoral votes.
kaylynfreeman

Opinion | Lies, Damned Lies and Trump Rallies - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Donald Trump lies a lot. In fact, he lies so often that several media organizations try to keep a running tally, and even try to draw political inferences from fluctuations in the number of lies he tells in a given month (although the trend has been relentlessly upward).
    • kaylynfreeman
       
      He has lied throughout his entire four years as president and he continues to lie especially in his debates. He would have never been president if it wasn't for his rich, white privilege.
  • It’s not so much that Trump is lying more as that the lies have become qualitatively different — even more blatant, and increasingly untethered to any plausible political strategy.
  • But ordinary voters aren’t experts in health policy and might not have remembered all those broken promises, so there was at least a chance that some people would be fooled.
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  • Trump repeatedly claimed that thanks to the state’s Democratic governor, “You can’t go to church.” Thousands of churchgoing Pennsylvanians know that this simply isn’t true.
  • Wait, it gets worse. In last week’s debate, Trump declared that New York is a “ghost town.” Eight million people can see with their naked eyes that it isn’t.
  • Trump’s now-standard claims that we’re “rounding the corner” on the coronavirus and declared that one of the administration’s major achievements was “ending the Covid-19 pandemic.”Who was that supposed to convince, when almost everyone is aware not only that the pandemic continues, but that coronavirus cases and hospitalizations are surging? All it did was make Trump look even more out of touch.
  • On Wednesday, campaigning in Arizona, Trump went on a rant about California, where “you have a special mask. You cannot under any circumstances take it off. You have to eat through the mask. Right, right, Charlie? It’s a very complex mechanism.” As 39 million California residents can tell you, nothing remotely like that exists.
  • That’s a bad question, because he doesn’t accept that there is such a thing as objective truth. There are things he wants to believe, and so he does; there are other things he doesn’t want to believe, so he doesn’t.
  • What’s scary about all this isn’t just the possibility that Trump may yet win — or steal — a second term. It’s the fact that almost his entire party, and tens of millions of voters, seem perfectly willing to follow him into the abyss.
  • Indeed, current Republican strategy is almost entirely based on trying to scare voters about bad things that aren’t happening —
katherineharron

A record number of women will serve in the next Congress - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • Mace defeated Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham, becoming one of a record number of women who will serve in the 117th Congress — and a record number of Republican women who will serve in the House.
  • With races still to be called, at least 141 women will serve in Congress next year, breaking the record of 127 set in 2019, according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University.
  • That includes at least 116 women in the House — smashing the record of 102 also set in 2019 — and 25 in the Senate, although that number could shrink with California Sen. Kamala Harris' ascendancy to the vice presidency.
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  • Four of the nine Republican women in the Senate were vulnerable in this year's elections, but only Arizona Sen. Martha McSally was defeated, while appointed Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler's fate will be determined in a January runoff.
  • There will be at least six new women of color in Congress — four Democrats and two Republicans — including Democrats Cori Bush, who will be Missouri's first Black congresswoman, and Nikema Williams, who was elected to the late Rep. John Lewis' seat in Georgia.
  • But the majority of the 24 non-incumbent women joining Congress in January are White, including 13 Republicans and five Democrats.
  • At least 91 White women will serve in the 117th Congress, up from 79 this year.
  • his year, though, it's Republican women who have made significant gains. After electing only one new Republican woman to the House in the midterms, Republicans this year have elected at least 15 non-incumbent women.
  • That means the number of Republican women in the House will at least double. (Currently there are only 13 women in the House GOP conference, and two of them did not run for reelection.) Democrats are adding nine new women, which balances out those they lost to defeat and retirement, increasing their numbers to 89 for now.
  • Whereas Democratic women have long been boosted by the pro-abortion rights group EMILY's List, which stands for "Early Money is Like Yeast," Republicans have lacked comparable infrastructure to invest in female candidates
  • That attitude, at least, began to shift after 2018, when New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, who had recruited more than 100 women as head of recruitment for the House GOP campaign arm, only to see one of them win, publicly sounded the alarm.
  • "It was the perfect storm. We had competitive seats that were winnable and we had incredible women in those districts with prior legislative experience and who knew how to put a campaign together," said Julie Conway
  • But by far the biggest reason for that success is that more Republican women raised their hands to run than ever before — in part because they saw what Democratic women did in 2018 — and more of them won primaries, which has traditionally been the biggest hurdle.
  • "Women around the country have watched other women before them be successful and realize, 'Hey, I can do it,'" said Iowa GOP Rep.-elect Ashley Hinson, who last week defeated Democratic Rep. Abby Finkenauer, one of the women who flipped a district in 2018.
  • But while the campaign committee still does not play in primaries, its leadership acknowledged it had to do better electing diverse candidates — rallying behind another woman, Indiana Rep. Susan Brooks, as the head of recruitment for 2020 — and now proudly touting female candidates' success this year.
  • Just as Democratic women were in 2018, Republican women this year were well-positioned to take advantage of a favorable environment.
  • "Being the first Republican woman elected to Congress in the state of South Carolina is deeply humbling," Mace said. "It reminds me that Democratic women do not hold a monopoly on breaking glass ceilings."
  • Women candidates often receive questions their male colleagues do not — like who's going to take care of their kids.
  • "The lady at the door, she thought I should be at home with my children. And I basically said, 'Well, I'm setting a good example for them.'"
  • The elected women agree the perspectives they bring to Congress are wanted — and needed.
  • Rep.-elect Carolyn Bourdeaux, the only Democrat who has so far flipped a competitive GOP-held district this year, won in the northeast Atlanta suburbs that are now the epicenter of the political battleground with the Senate majority hinging on two Georgia Senate seats.
  • "Many people here didn't even know that there were Democrats in their neighborhood," she said of the groundwork that that initial race laid.
  • Republicans have flipped eight Democrat-held seats, according to CNN projections so far, and women have delivered all but one of those wins. That means they're likely to face difficult reelections in the future, possibly against Democratic women.
  • "The whole idea of having 'girl seats' does not get us any closer to parity," she said.
  • A record 643 women ran for Congress in 2020 — 583 for the House and 60 for the Senate.
  • That is in part because as more women run for office, they are also more often running against each other, both in primaries and general elections. In 2016, women ran against each other in 17 House and Senate general election races, according to data from the Center for American Women and Politics. In 2020, that grew to 51 races with women challenging each other.
  • "I've already gotten texts from other women who are interested in running here in Iowa since the election last week," said Hinson
  • "I do feel like it's gotten better over the years, but I see it more often than not, and it's true on both sides of the aisle. That's why I'm always encouraging women to run."
katherineharron

Fact checking the outlandish claim that millions of Trump votes were deleted - CNNPolitics - 0 views

  • A human error that briefly led to incorrect election results in a Michigan county has spiraled into a sprawling, baseless conspiracy theory suggesting that glitches in widely-used voting software led to millions of miscast ballots.
  • Conservative media figures, social media users, and President Donald Trump have spread rumors about problems with Dominion Voting Systems
  • They've claimed that isolated reports about Election Night glitches raise concerns about election results in states around the country.
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  • "DOMINION DELETED 2.7 MILLION TRUMP VOTES NATIONWIDE," Trump tweeted on Thursday, citing a report from the right-wing One America News Network. Without showing any evidence, he claimed that states using the company's technology had "SWITCHED 435,000 VOTES FROM TRUMP TO BIDEN."
  • Trump's tweet is completely without evidence.
  • "No credible reports or evidence of any software issues exist," the company wrote. "While no election is without isolated issues, Dominion Voting Systems are reliably and accurately counting ballots. State and local election authorities have publicly confirmed the integrity of the process."
  • the network claims to have proof of widespread voter fraud but is choosing to sit on that proof for more than a week.
  • Giuliani has claimed to have received an affidavit from someone "inside" Dominion who alleges that batches of "phony" pro-Biden ballots were counted. Giuliani hasn't released any evidence.
  • Dominion, a Canadian company founded in 2002 with US headquarters in Denver, is the second-largest provider of voting technology in the US, according to a 2017 report from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton Public Policy Initiative. In 2016, Dominion's technology was used in 1,635 jurisdictions in more than two dozen states, the report found
  • Further undermining Trump's claims was the fact that hours after his tweet, federal government agencies released a statement declaring that "the November 3rd election was the most secure in American history."
  • The county's initial results showed Joe Biden leading, and election officials quickly realized on election night that something was wrong with their results, the local clerk told the Detroit Free Press last week.
  • The county uses Dominion's technology to tally ballots, but the mistake was due to human error and not the company's systems, according to the Michigan Secretary of State.
  • "This was an isolated error, there is no evidence this user error occurred elsewhere in the state, and if it did it would be caught during county canvasses, which are conducted by bipartisan boards of county canvassers," the secretary of state's office said in its statement.
  • Other rumors pointed to Oakland County, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, where initial results mistakenly double-counted votes from the city of Rochester Hills, according to the secretary of state's office. But that was due to human error, not a software issue, the local clerk said.
  • "As a Republican, I am disturbed that this is intentionally being mischaracterized to undermine the election process," Tina Barton, the clerk of Rochester Hills, Michigan, said
  • But online, right-wing voices -- including Giuliani, Eric Trump, conservative Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar and Breitbart News -- have seized on those isolated issues as purported evidence of wider "glitches" with Dominion's software.
  • "It really does feel like people believe what they want to believe," he said. "I don't think I've ever seen it quite like this before."
  • Social media posts have also baselessly alleged ties between Dominion and Democratic leaders, misinformation that was first noted and debunked by The Associated Press.
  • Several Twitter posts that have been retweeted thousands of times have claimed that the company is involved with the Clinton Foundation. But while Dominion did agree to donate its technology to "emerging democracies" as part of a program run by the Clinton Foundation in 2014, according to the foundation's website, Dominion said in its statement that it has "no company ownership relationships" with the foundation.
ethanshilling

Immunity to the Coronavirus May Last Years, New Data Hint - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Blood samples from recovered patients suggest a powerful, long-lasting immune response, researchers reported.
  • Although antibodies in the blood are needed to block the virus and forestall a second infection — a condition known as sterilizing immunity — immune cells that “remember” the virus more often are responsible for preventing serious illness.
  • Eight months after infection, most people who have recovered still have enough immune cells to fend off the virus and prevent illness, the new data show. A slow rate of decline in the short term suggests, happily, that these cells may persist in the body for a very, very long time to come.
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  • “That amount of memory would likely prevent the vast majority of people from getting hospitalized disease, severe disease, for many years,” said Shane Crotty, a virologist at the La Jolla Institute of Immunology who co-led the new study.
  • A study published last week also found that people who have recovered from Covid-19 have powerful and protective killer immune cells even when antibodies are not detectable.
  • These studies “are all by and large painting the same picture, which is that once you get past those first few critical weeks, the rest of the response looks pretty conventional,” said Deepta Bhattacharya, an immunologist at the University of Arizona
  • A small number of infected people in the new study did not have long-lasting immunity after recovery, perhaps because of differences in the amounts of coronavirus they were exposed to.
  • How long might immunity to the coronavirus last? Years, maybe even decades, according to a new study
  • More often, people become infected a second time with a particular pathogen, and the immune system recognizes the invader and quickly extinguishes the infection. The coronavirus in particular is slow to do harm, giving the immune system plenty of time to kick into gear.
  • “It may be terminated fast enough that not only are you not experiencing any symptoms but you are not infectious,” Dr. Sette said.
  • Dr. Sette and his colleagues recruited 185 men and women, aged 19 to 81, who had recovered from Covid-19. The majority had mild symptoms not requiring hospitalization
  • The team tracked four components of the immune system: antibodies, B cells that make more antibodies as needed; and two types of T cells that kill other infected cells.
  • He and his colleagues found that antibodies were durable, with modest declines at six to eight months after infection, although there was a 200-fold difference in the levels among the participants.
  • The study is the first to chart the immune response to a virus in such granular detail, experts said. “For sure, we have no priors here,” Dr. Gommerman said. “We’re learning, I think for the first time, about some of the dynamics of these populations through time.”
  • Exactly how long immunity lasts is hard to predict, because scientists don’t yet know what levels of various immune cells are needed to protect from the virus. But studies so far have suggested that even small numbers of antibodies or T and B cells may be enough to shield those who have recovered.
cartergramiak

Trump Forms PAC in Hopes of Keeping Hold on G.O.P. - The New York Times - 0 views

  • President Trump is has formed a so-called leadership political action committee, a federal fund-raising vehicle that will potentially let him retain his hold on the Republican Party even after he leaves office.
  • The move comes just days after the major news networks and newspapers, as well as The Associated Press, called the 2020 election for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
  • Such committees can accept donations of up to $5,000 per donor per year — far less than the donation limits for the committees formed by Mr. Trump’s campaign and the Republican National Committee — but a leadership PAC could accept donations from an unlimited number of people. It could also accept donations from other political action committees.
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  • On Monday night, fund-raising solicitations from the Trump campaign revealed that 60 percent of donations would be directed to the new entity, “Save America.”
  • “The president always planned to do this, win or lose,” Mr. Murtaugh said, “so he can support candidates and issues he cares about, such as combating voter fraud.”
  • Still, a PAC could give the president an off-ramp after a bruising election fight, as well as keep him as a dominant figure as the next Republican presidential primary races are beginning for a new standard-bearer.
  • Even as Mr. Biden has gathered more than the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win, and as he has taken leads of tens of thousands of votes in several battleground states, Mr. Trump has maintained there was voter fraud on a wide scale, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He has directed his campaign to march forward with legal challenges in states like Arizona and Nevada, despite most advisers believing that the race is over and that he should move on.
  • While the leadership PAC could not help him in such an effort, it could provide an interim vehicle that would let him travel and engage in some political activity, even if he never actually runs again.
delgadool

Why Polling on The 2020 Presidential Election Missed the Mark - The New York Times - 0 views

  • And most polls underestimated President Trump’s strength, in Iowa, Florida, Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin and elsewhere. Instead of winning a landslide, as the polls suggested, Joseph R. Biden Jr. beat Mr. Trump by less than two percentage points in the states that decided the election.
  • “This was a bad year for polling,” David Shor, a data scientist who advises Democratic campaigns, said. Douglas Rivers, the chief scientist of YouGov, a global polling firm, said, “We’re obviously going to have a black eye on this.”
  • This year’s misleading polls had real-world effects, for both political parties. The Trump campaign pulled back from campaigning in Michigan and Wisconsin, reducing visits and advertising, and lost both only narrowly. In Arizona, a Republican strategist who worked on Senator Martha McSally’s re-election campaign said that public polling showing her far behind “probably cost us $4 or $5 million” in donations. Ms. McSally lost to Mark Kelly by less than three percentage points.
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  • People’s decreasing willingness to respond to polls
  • Some types of voters seem less willing to respond to polls than others, perhaps because they are less trusting of institutions, and these voters seem to lean Republican.
  • A much-hyped theory that Trump supporters lie to pollsters appears to be wrong or insignificant. Polls did not underestimate his support more in liberal areas, where supporting Mr. Trump can be less socially acceptable, than in conservative areas.
  • Although Literary Digest’s sample of 2.4 million respondents was enormous, it was not representative. The magazine’s circulation skewed toward affluent Americans, who were more hostile to Roosevelt and the New Deal than most voters. A less prominent pollster that year, George Gallup, had surveyed many fewer people — about 50,000 — but he had been careful to ensure they matched the country’s demographic mix. Mr. Gallup correctly predicted a Roosevelt win.
  • In 1948, the pollsters’ luck ran out. They continued to overestimate the Republican vote share, reporting throughout the campaign that President Harry Truman trailed his Republican opponent, Thomas Dewey. This time, the election was close enough that the polls pointed to the wrong winner, contributing to perhaps the most famous error in modern journalism, The Chicago Tribune’s banner headline “Dewey Defeats Truman.”
  • Nearly every poll showed Hillary Clinton to be leading Mr. Trump in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The leads were big enough that her campaign paid relatively little attention to those states. But she lost all three narrowly, giving Mr. Trump a stunning victory.
  • One factor was largely unsolvable: Late-deciding voters, accurately identified as undecided in polls, broke strongly for Mr. Trump.
saberal

17 Republican Attorneys General Back Trump in Far-Fetched Election Lawsuit - The New Yo... - 0 views

  • The move is an attempt to bolster a baseless legal effort by Texas that seeks to delay certification of the presidential electors in four battleground states that Mr. Trump lost.
  • and have largely dismissed it as a publicity stunt.Late Tuesday, the president asked Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, a Republican, if he would be willing to argue the case, according to a person familiar with their conversation. Mr. Cruz agreed, this person said. And the president has filed a motion with the court to intervene, which would make him a party to the case.
  • The willingness of so many Republican politicians to publicly involve themselves in a legal campaign to invalidate the ballots of millions of Americans shows how singular a figure Mr. Trump remains in the G.O.P. That these political allies are also elected officials whose jobs involve enforcing laws, including voting rights, underscores the extraordinary nature of the brief to the court
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  • Mr. Trump has repeatedly tried to pressure Republican state legislators and elections officials — who have the most influence over declaring the formal winner and allocating electoral votes — to deny victory to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. They have largely resisted him.
  • The 17 states behind the amicus brief represent a majority of the 25 Republican attorneys general across the country, and include Alabama, Florida, Kansas, Missouri, Louisiana and South Dakota. Notably, the two Republican attorneys general in the battleground states that Mr. Trump lost — Arizona and Georgia — are not part of the brief.
  • Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican and former attorney general of the state, seemed baffled by the legal maneuver, calling it “extraordinary” and “unprecedented.”“I’ve never seen something like this, so I don’t know what the Supreme Court’s going to do,” he said in Washington on Wednesday.
clairemann

Justices to weigh Kentucky attorney general's effort to intervene in abortion battle - ... - 0 views

  • When then-President Donald Trump released his updated list of potential Supreme Court nominees in September 2020, one name that garnered attention was that of Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron
  • The case, Cameron v. EMW Women’s Surgical Center, arises from a challenge to a Kentucky law, H.B. 454, that generally makes it a crime for doctors to use the “dilation and evacuation” method, the procedure most commonly employed to end a pregnancy during the second trimester.
  • They argued that, because the law effectively outlaws the most common procedure used during the second trimester, it imposes an undue burden on the right to an abortion before the fetus becomes viable – normally somewhere between 22 and 24 weeks.
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  • The district court agreed with the challengers that the law is unconstitutional, and it permanently blocked Kentucky from enforcing the law.
  • A divided 6th Circuit panel turned down Cameron’s request to join the case. It explained that Cameron’s plea had come “years into” the case, after both the district court’s ruling and the 6th Circuit’s opinion upholding that ruling. Granting a motion to intervene after the court of appeals has already issued its opinion, the court reasoned, would “provide potential intervenors every incentive to sit out litigation untill we issue a decision contrary to their preferences, whereupon they can spring into action.”
  • Cameron went to the Supreme Court in October 2020, asking the justices to weigh in on whether he should have been allowed to intervene and, if so, to send the case back to the lower courts for another look in light of their June 2020 decision in June Medical. In March 2021, the court agreed to take up only the procedural question.
  • In the Supreme Court, Cameron framed the case as a “dispute about a State’s sovereign ability to defend its laws.”
  • The attorney general’s office can’t enter the case now, the clinic wrote, because the office didn’t file a notice of appeal from the district court’s 2019 ruling. Allowing Cameron to intervene in the 6th Circuit in 2020, the clinic told the justices, “would create an impermissible end-run around Congress’s express statutory limits on appellate jurisdiction.”
  • there is no reason to disturb the denial of that motion by the court of appeals.
  • Arizona and 22 other states filed a “friend of the court” brief supporting Cameron in which they described the question presented by the case as one “of profound substantive importance to our democratic system of governance.” “States,” they wrote, “have a compelling and indisputable sovereign interest in defending the constitutionality of their laws when challenged in federal court.”
Javier E

Telosa: Marc Lore and Bjarke Ingels unveil plans for 5-million-person city in the Ameri... - 0 views

  • The former Walmart executive last week unveiled plans for Telosa, a sustainable metropolis that he hopes to create, from scratch, in the American desert. The ambitious 150,000-acre proposal promises eco-friendly architecture, sustainable energy production and a purportedly drought-resistant water system. A so-called "15-minute city design" will allow residents to access their workplaces, schools and amenities within a quarter-hour commute of their homes.
  • Although planners are still scouting for locations, possible targets include Nevada, Utah, Idaho, Arizona, Texas and the Appalachian region, according to the project's official website.
  • The first phase of construction, which would accommodate 50,000 residents across 1,500 acres, comes with an estimated cost of $25 billion. The whole project would be expected to exceed $400 billion, with the city reaching its target population of 5 million within 40 years.
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  • "Cities that have been built to date from scratch are more like real estate projects," Lore said in a promotional video for the project. "They don't start with people at the center. Because if you started with people at the center, you would immediately think, 'OK, what's the mission and what are the values?'
  • On Telosa's official website, Lore explains that he was inspired by American economist and social theorist Henry George. The investor cites capitalism's "significant flaws," attributing many of them to "the land ownership model that America was built on."
  • BIG's founder, Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, is meanwhile quoted as saying that Telosa "embodies the social and environmental care of Scandinavian culture, and the freedom and opportunity of a more American culture."
  • It is not the first new city being planned by Ingels' firm, which famously installed a ski slope on top of a Copenhagen power plant and has co-designed Google's new headquarters in London and California. In January 2020, Japanese carmaker Toyota revealed that it had commissioned BIG to create a master plan for a new 2,000-person city in the foothills of Mount Fuji. Although significantly smaller than Telosa, the project, dubbed Woven City, promises autonomous vehicle testing, smart technology and robot-assisted living.
woodlu

Why Democrats' tax plans are such a mess | The Economist - 0 views

  • 0E BIDEN promised to pay for his big social-spending proposals by raising taxes on the rich and nobody else.
  • Now Democrats are rushing to find a big pot of money without raising headline rates of tax at all.
  • predicting that they would soon reach a compromise on a social-spending bill that would pass in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, where they cannot afford a single dissenting vote in their ranks.
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  • Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona,
  • satisfy two centrists:
  • Joe Manchin of West Virginia
  • desire for higher tax revenues without higher tax rates has left Democrats scrambling to make deep changes to how some levies work
  • new minimum tax on the biggest corporations’ accounting profits, which can exceed those declared to the tax authorities.
  • is a levy on
  • firms that buy back their own stock, a longtime bugbear on the left
  • a reform to the federal capital-gains tax that is designed to ensnare the ultra-rich. It would tax them annually on the paper gains of their investment portfolios, rather than when assets are sold, as under the current system
  • firms could avoid the tax attached to them by paying dividends instead.
  • no sound economic reason for penalising share buy-backs
  • A tax on the book profits of companies would outsource tax rules to unaccountable accounting bodies, reduce the efficacy of desirable tax deductions for investment and, by interfering with the ability to carry forward losses, play havoc with firms whose profits are volatile.
  • The “mark-to-market” capital gains tax is a messy attempt to rapidly extract enormous amounts from a tiny number of the very rich
  • proposal which is even more poorly designed, and which Mr Manchin is right to oppose
  • That would ultimately be bad for investment and the incentive to innovate, and would get in the way of the widespread ownership of equities.
  • straightforward result of their fragile control of Congress and the idiosyncrasies of two of their senators
  • failed to bring in straightforward reforms that raise revenue by enlarging the tax base
  • abolishing the egregious exemption that resets accrued capital gains to zero when owners die and pass on their estates.
  • Taxing capital gains at death, as Mr Biden first proposed, would raise more than $200bn over a decade—not far off the “several hundred billion” Democrats say the tax on investment portfolios would yield
  • lobbyists defeated the idea
  • also preserved the carried-interest loophole, which lets investment managers class their fees as lightly taxed capital gains, not income.
  • lifting the cap on an exemption from federally taxable income of money used to pay state and local taxes. Doing that would benefit the wealthy, narrow the tax base and subsidise high-tax states.
  • Mr Biden ignored the example of Europe. Its social spending is funded using broad-based and efficient taxes, most notably value-added tax, a levy on consumption
  • unfriendly to economic growth to begin with. Narrowing the target further—the capital-gains reform would apply only to billionaires and those with more than $100m in annual income sustained over three years
  • this tax would apply only to securities traded on public markets, with different rules for stakes in privately held firms, it would deter entrepreneurs from floating their companies on the stock exchange.
  • Democrats have pretended that raising taxes on businesses would have no negative effect on wages, contrary to the overwhelming consensus among economists.
  • The failure to agree on a tax plan carries echoes of doomed Republican attempts, under Donald Trump, to “repeal and replace” the Obamacare health-insurance system.
  • Democrats will have to confront the fact that permanently expanding the welfare state without damaging the economy means winning an argument for higher taxes, rather than always telling voters that some rich person will pay.
Javier E

North Dakota coal sector sees opportunity in electric vehicles - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Carbon capture has been a popular idea within the coal, oil and gas sectors for years now. The technology is not out of reach. Plenty of pilot projects have been launched. But so far no one has been able to make it a paying proposition. A pioneering $7.5 billion carbon capture power plant in Mississippi was razed with dynamite on Oct. 9 after its owners wrote it off as an 11-year-old economic failure. North Dakota hopes to break through that last barrier, for both coal and oil.
  • “True wealth is created by a partnership between man and earth,” said Bohrer. If Project Tundra can show that stuffing carbon dioxide back into the earth is economically feasible, he said, “it’s opening the door for a CO2 economy. It gives the lignite industry a way to survive.”
  • His group has launched a promotional campaign called Drive Electric North Dakota, which sponsors promotional events, conducts public attitude surveys and lobbies for EVs in the state capital. It has been an uphill struggle so far, but the idea is that the electricity needed to charge cars and trucks can’t all come from unreliable wind or solar, and this will give coal a way to stay in the mix and help keep the grid in fine tune. “The more demand we have in North Dakota,” Bohrer said, “the easier it is to soak up our domestically produced electricity.”
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  • Not only is the process still prohibitively expensive, research has shown that so far it hasn’t been very effective. A 2019 study at Stanford University found that current carbon capture projects miss well more than half of the carbon dioxide in emissions.
  • Project Tundra’s managers hope they can achieve a significant breakthrough, aiming to capture 90 percent of the CO2 once they have the project in operation. Essentially, the carbon dioxide would be absorbed out of the “flue gas,” or exhaust, by amine-based solvents, which would be pumped to a regeneration unit that would heat the solvents and free the CO2 again, in a pure form. Then it would be condensed and pumped to natural caverns deep underground.
  • For now the project is still in the design and engineering phase, together with financial analysis. Equipment at the site has been used to test the process; now the results are being analyzed. If the pieces fall into place and the project gets a green light from regulators and company officials, construction could get started as early as next year.
  • “This carbon sequestration project really gets us excited,” he said. “It gives coal a role in stabilizing the grid.” He added: “If there are better solutions than coal out there, so be it. We just believe those solutions don’t exist.”
  • Destiny Wolf, 39, an upbeat advocate for electric vehicles, also feels the stigma of driving a Tesla — in her case a Model 3.Oil workers, Wolf said, see electric vehicles as an attack on their livelihoods. “You know, sitting there at a red light, they drive up, roll down their windows, they start yelling and cursing at me,” she said. “If that’s your existence, it’s really sad.”
  • Her attitude about the coal-powered electricity she uses in her car is that it’s not great, it’s probably on the way out, it’s better than using gasoline.“Gas is a continuous circle of energy wastage,” she said. “You have to use energy to extract it, you have to use energy to transport it, you have to use energy to refine it, you have to use energy to transport it back.
  • Kathy Neset moved to the Bakken with a degree in geology from Brown University in 1979 and built a successful oil-field consulting company on the vast, windswept jumble of low hills and ridges, once good only for cattle raising. She understands perfectly well that electric cars are coming, yet she has faith that new uses for petroleum will keep the oil sector in business.
  • “Do we blow away like tumbleweeds? Or do we evolve?” she said in an interview at her gleaming office building in Tioga, N.D. “This is an industry that has a history of adopting, evolving and changing with the nation. I don’t see oil going away in any of our lifetimes. It’s our way of life. Where we lose out on transportation we will gain on new technologies.”
  • There are warning signs, nonetheless. Even though the price of oil has bounced back after the disastrous months when the pandemic struck last year, and production at existing wells is humming along, there’s little new drilling in the Bakken. The number of rigs has fallen from 55 in early 2020 to 23 today.
  • Neset said she believes that investment firms, especially those that have signed on to corporate governance protocols that embrace environmental and social goals, “just don’t want to put their capital into new drilling until we figure out a way to handle this in a clean way.”
  • So the oil sector, too, is putting its chips on carbon capture.
  • Charles Gorecki, CEO of an incubator at the University of North Dakota called the Energy and Environmental Research Center, is promoting a plan similar to the coal industry’s Project Tundra. But it would go further — he envisions the injection of carbon dioxide into deep caverns as a way of enhancing the extraction of more oil. More carbon would go into the ground than would come out of it as petroleum, he said. North Dakota could even import carbon dioxide from other states.
  • “There is an enormous amount of space to store CO2,” he said. “What we need to do is make it an economically attractive option. The goal is to reduce carbon emissions. It should be by any and all means.”
  • A new state body called the Clean Sustainable Energy Authority is charged with promoting clean-energy technologies — with the understanding that the energy being talked about is from coal, oil or natural gas. Carbon capture is one idea; another is hydrogen-powered vehicles, using “blue” hydrogen from natural gas.
  • “Even if we transition to all electric vehicles and hydrogen vehicles, North Dakota will have a part to play,” said Joel Brown, a member of the CSEA. “I think of it as a moonshot for the state of North Dakota.”
  • In the history of the Bakken, 3 billion barrels of oil have been pumped out. Brown said 30 billion to 40 billion more barrels is still in the ground and recoverable.
  • “We have to make that Bakken barrel just a little bit cleaner than every other barrel in the world,” said Ron Ness, head of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, a trade group. “You look at the standard American family and the affordability of the combustion engine, and I think gasoline is going to be around for a long time.”
  • North Dakota went from being the 10th-largest oil-producing state in 2005 to the second in 2015.
  • Watford City is in McKenzie County, which between 2010 and 2019 was the fastest-growing county in the United States, according to census figures. In the late 1990s, said Steve Holen, the school superintendent, people thought the county would soon have nothing but bison and nursing homes. Oil changed all that, and residents are reluctant to let that go.
  • “In rural America there is very little you can do without that [oil],” Ness said. “We just don’t have opportunities here. It enables us to build schools, rather than close schools.”
  • Consequently, there’s a widespread conviction in the Bakken that electric vehicles will never amount to much. “It’s a cultural challenge,” said Neset. “I’m not sure how many of these cowboys and cowgirls are going to want to jump in an electric car.”
  • A question about EVs that was put to a Bakken Facebook group elicited scathing, vulgar responses. “Let the retirees living in Florida, Arizona and California buy them. I am from North Dakota, give me a gas guzzling ‘truck,’” wrote one.
  • “Anyone that supports electric over gas and works in the Bakken is a hypocrite. Your job revolves around oil. No oil = No job for most. Easiest math I have ever done,” wrote another.
  • “Never, ever, ever,” wrote a third.But there are signs this hostility to electric is cracking.
clairemann

Sinema Says She Will Not Support Changing Filibuster - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Senator Kyrsten Sinema, Democrat of Arizona, declared that she would not support undermining the Senate filibuster to enact new laws under any circumstances.
  • she believed that a unilateral Democratic move to weaken the filibuster would only foster growing political division.
  • “These bills help treat the symptoms of the disease, but they do not fully address the disease itself,”
    • clairemann
       
      is she being too idealistic?
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  • the House approved the new measure on a party-line vote of 220 to 203 after a heated partisan debate in which lawmakers clashed over the state of election laws across the country.
  • Ms. Sinema has been under pressure from her colleagues to drop her opposition to a rules change, but her refusal to reverse course appeared to doom the bills in the Senate.
  • Democrats said the legislation was urgently needed to offset efforts taking hold in Republican-led states to make it more difficult to vote after Democratic gains in the 2020 elections and former President Donald J. Trump’s false claim that the vote was stolen.
    • clairemann
       
      the legislation is reactionary - could it backfire when the senate become R?
  • “There are people who don’t want you to vote and they are using every tool in the toolbox to make it harder,”
  • Democrats of “hijacking” the space agency measure to push through legislation that they said represented federal intrusion into state voting operations to give an unfair advantage to Democratic candidates.
sidneybelleroche

Associated Press News - 0 views

  • President Joe Biden wrapped up his time at the Group of 20 summit on Sunday trying to convince Americans and the wider world that he’s got things under control — and taking Russia, China and Saudi Arabia to task for not doing enough to deal with the existential threat of climate change.
  • But the policy issues also seemed to fade for Biden when asked about his time Friday with Pope Francis. The president became deeply emotional, his hands appearing to fiddle with the mask he wore as a precaution because of COVID-19.
  • But he also acknowledged what he can’t yet achieve: bringing Russia, China and Saudi Arabia to the table with the broader international community to limit carbon emissions and move to renewable energy.
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  • For all the challenges confronting him, the president attempted to stay optimistic. As Biden departed the news conference, he offered a thumbs up when asked if West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin and Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema — key Democratic votes — were on board with his $1.75 trillion spending package for families, health care and renewable energy. The president also shrugged off his recent decline in the polls, saying that numbers go up and down
  • Biden’s overall take on his efforts: On climate change, he’s got $900 billion planned for renewable energy, and Congress will vote this coming week.
  • The president did leave the G-20 with commitments by his fellow leaders on a global minimum tax that would make it harder for large companies to avoid taxes by assigning their profits to countries with low tax rates.
  • The president met Sunday with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose office said the meeting was held in a “positive atmosphere” despite tensions over human rights and Turkey’s purchase of a Russian missile system, among other issues.
  • Biden heads Monday to the U.N. climate summit in Scotland, where he’ll once again face questions about whether the world’s wealthiest are doing enough to stop the warming of the Earth by moving away from fossil fuels.
kennyn-77

Manchin Raises Doubts on Safety Net Bill, Complicating Path to Quick Vote - The New Yor... - 0 views

  • Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia raised new doubts on Monday about an emerging compromise on a $1.85 trillion climate change and social safety net bill, warning that he had serious reservations about the plan and criticizing liberals in his party for what he called an “all or nothing” stance on it
  • It came as congressional negotiators were closing in on a final deal on the social policy and climate legislation, which progressives have called a prerequisite to supporting a separate, $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill.
  • curb the rising cost of prescription drugs, which had been left out of an outline that Mr. Biden presented on Thursday. Negotiators had all but secured a compromise that would include a $2,000 annual cap on out-of-pocket prescription expenditures for older Americans,
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  • There would also be price limits on insulin, rebates on drugs whose prices rise faster than inflation and some limited government power to negotiate drug prices.
  • Democrats have shrunk their proposal considerably — from $3.5 trillion to about half that size — largely to win his support and that of Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, another centrist holdout.
  • Mr. Manchin found fault not only with the overall price tag, but the way the bill is structured. Its authors have phased in some policies over time and abruptly ended most of the programs — some of them after a single year — in hopes of showing that over 10 years, the plan would not raise the deficit.
  • Mr. Manchin called dishonest gimmickry that he said would threaten the future of Social Security and Medicare. (Those programs are financed through dedicated trust funds, which are not directly affected by the bill.)
  • Joe Manchin does not get to dictate the future of our country,” Representative Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri, said in a statement. “I do not trust his assessment of what our communities need the most.
  • Mr. Biden’s framework omitted any mention of prescription savings, infuriating some Democrats, animating the older Americans’ lobby AARP and prompting late negotiations that lasted through the weekend.
  • Many Democratic lawmakers ran on a promise to lower prescription drug prices, a popular message supported by majorities of both Democratic and Republican voters. But that pledge has encountered strong resistance from the powerful pharmaceutical industry, which has been spending millions in television advertisements and deploying lobbyists to Capitol Hill to plead its case.
kennyn-77

House, Mostly Along Party Lines, Censures Gosar for Violent Video - The New York Times - 0 views

  • A bitterly divided U.S. House of Representatives voted narrowly on Wednesday to censure Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, for posting an animated video that depicted him killing a Democratic congresswoman and assaulting President Biden.
  • The vote was 223 to 207, with just two Republicans, Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, joining Democrats in favor. One other Republican, Representative David Joyce of Ohio, voted “present.”
  • They said the rapid move to pass a censure resolution exposed the Democrats’ true agenda: silencing conservatives by branding them as instigators of violence.
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  • “When a member uses his or her national platform to encourage violence, tragically, people listen,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said, adding that “depictions of violence can foment actual violence, as witnessed by this chamber on Jan. 6, 2021.”
  • Mr. Gosar showed no remorse.
  • The last time the House censured one of its members, the vote capped months of humiliating headlines over tax evasion, self-dealing and other ethical lapses that had blemished the reputation of one of Congress’s most powerful and colorful characters, Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York. Ms. Pelosi herself read out that rebuke, which passed overwhelmingly with the support of many Democrats.
  • e posting online of a crudely edited video drawn from a popular anime series — and more sinister. In his video, Mr. Gosar is depicted slashing the neck of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, amid imagery of violence meted out against hordes of refugees and migrants.
  • “There’s an old definition of abuse of power: rules for thee but not for me,” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, said, repeating the phrase over and over. Going through a litany of House Democrats who have offended Republicans, he warned that every one of them might soon be serving — and potentially penalized — under the rules of a Republican-led House.
  • And many warned that a Republican majority — which could come as soon as 2023 — would not hesitate to take advantage of the precedents set by Democrats.
  • “They are really setting an ugly precedent, and the bad news for Democrats is that we’re going to take back the House and we’re going to hold the majority,” Ms. Greene said.
  • Not only does Mr. Gosar’s character kill Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s, and swing swords at one with the face of Mr. Biden, but the makers of the video also include images of refugees and migrants making their way into the United States only to be repelled by brutal force.
  • Mr. Gosar has not apologized for posting the video, downplaying it as “symbolic” and privately blaming staff aides for circulating it.
  • “I don’t think this should be an issue about party, about partisan politics,” Ms. Cheney said. “If a Democrat had done this, that would require censure as well.”
  • Censure fell out of favor, and the bar for it was raised considerably, in the 20th century. In 1978, Representative Charles C. Diggs was censured after he was convicted on 11 counts of mail fraud and 18 counts of false statements in a payroll fraud investigation. On one day in 1983, Representatives Gerry E. Studds and Daniel B. Crane were both censured for having sex with 17-year-old congressional pages, criminal offenses that would likely warrant a far more dramatic response today.
lilyrashkind

5 Ways September 11 Changed America - HISTORY - 0 views

  • Nearly 3,000 Americans were killed on that clear, sunny morning when two hijacked airplanes crashed into the World Trade Center towers in New York City, another plowed into the Pentagon and a fourth was brought down in a crash on a Pennsylvania field by heroic passengers who fought back against terrorists.
  • The shock and horror of September 11th wasn’t confined to days or weeks. The attacks cast a long shadow over American life from which the nation has yet to fully emerge. What was once implausible and nearly unthinkable—a large-scale attack on American soil—became a collective assumption. The terrorists could very well attack again, perhaps with biological or nuclear weapons, and steps must be taken to stop them.
  • Consumed by fear, grief and outrage, America turned to its leaders for action. Congress and the White House answered with an unprecedented expansion of military, law enforcement and intelligence powers aimed at rooting out and stopping terrorists, at home and abroad.
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  • And that was just the beginning. Here are five significant ways that America was changed by 9/11.
  • When President George W. Bush addressed Congress and the nation on September 20, 2001, he made a case for a new kind of military response; not a targeted air strike on a single training facility or weapons bunker, but a wide-ranging global War on Terror.
  • When American troops invaded Afghanistan less than a month after September 11th, they were launching what became the longest sustained military campaign in U.S. history. The fight in Afghanistan had support from the American people and the backing of NATO allies to dismantle al Qaeda, crush the Taliban and kill Osama bin Laden, the murderous mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.
  • in 2015 and in 2016, that figure surpassed 2001 numbers, reaching 127.
  • One of the most disturbing aspects of the 9/11 attacks was that 19 al Qaeda hijackers were not only able to board commercial aircraft with crude weapons but also force their way into the cockpit. It was clear that 9/11 was both a failure of America’s intelligence apparatus to identify the attackers and a failure of airport security systems to stop them. Even though there had already been a handful of high-profile hijackings and bombings of commercial planes, including the tragic 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, security was not a high priority for airlines before 9/11, says Jeffrey Price, a professor of aviation and aerospace science at Metropolitan State University and a noted aviation security expert.
  •  Yet the ever-present shadow of 9/11, Jenkins says, kept U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan and elsewhere for nearly 20 years.
  • In addition to an army of blue-uniformed screeners, TSA introduced U.S. travelers to extensive new security protocols. Tickets and photo IDs became required to get through the screening area. Laptop computers and electronics had to be removed from carry-on bags. Shoes were taken off. Liquids were restricted to three-ounce containers. And conventional X-ray machines, which only detected metal objects, were eventually replaced with full-body scanners.
  • Just four days after the 9/11 attacks, a gunman in Mesa, Arizona went on a shooting rampage. First, he shot and killed Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station owner of Indian descent. Sodhi was Sikh, so he wore a turban. The gunman assumed he was Muslim. Minutes later, the gunman shot at another gas station clerk of Lebanese descent, but missed, and then shot through the windows of an Afghan-American family.
  • Before 9/11, people didn’t have to have a ticket to wander around the airport or wait at the gate. No one checked passengers' IDs before boarding the plane. And the only item people had to remove when passing through security was loose change from their pockets. Price says that most airports didn’t bother running background checks on their employees, and checked baggage was never scanned.
  • FBI conducted surveillance. Long-standing rules meant to protect Americans from “unreasonable search and seizure” were loosened or thrown out in the name of national security.
  • Congress gave the FBI and NSA new abilities to collect and share data. For example, the Patriot Act gave intelligence agencies the power to search an individual’s library records and internet search history with little judicial oversight. Agents could search a home without notifying the owner, and wiretap a phone line without establishing probable cause.
  • This law gave the NSA nearly unchecked authorities to eavesdrop on American phone calls, text messages and emails under the premise of targeting foreign nationals suspected of terrorism. 
  • “If anyone had said this is what they expected the threat to be the day after 9/11, they probably would have been laughed at,” says Sterman. “That would have seemed hopelessly naive.”
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